“The killer app is making calls.”–Steve Jobs

“For three days after death hair and finger nails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.”–Johnny Carson.

Phone calls? Who makes phone calls? Texts, chats, messages…yes. The only way I can get my daughter on the phone is to text her with a message to call me. And it helps to make it read like somebody died. Anyway, the Mobile World Congress was this week. I’d love to see the stats on calls vs. texts and miscellaneous messaging and chat apps among the attendees at the conference.

While you’re reading about all this week’s future-related news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes, PlayerFM, or YouTube(audio with slide show) and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook

“While technology is important, it’s what we do with it that truly matters.”–Muhammad Yunus

So what’s more important–technological breakthroughs or how we apply them? The cloud is a technology; blockchain is an application.

So where do the 10 breakthrough technologies that make up MIT Technology Review’s annual list for 2018 stand? All over the place. Many, if not all of them, might be described as either incremental improvements or advanced applications built on existing technologies. Where is the line? Tell me if you know.

Coming Attractions–Seeking Delphi,™ the podcast, will return in March, featuring interviews with Roberto Sacarro on social robotics, and Jerome Glenn, on The Millennium Project’s 19th State of the Future publication. We’ll also feature some on the spot interviews from the Intelligen Future tracks at the 2018 SXSW conference from Austin, Texas.

While you’re reading about all this week’s future-related news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes, PlayerFM, or YouTube(audio with slide show) and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook

“The main thing in life is not to be afraid of being human.”–Aaron Carter

You’ve heard it all, and lately you’re hearing it more. The singularity is near. Robots are going to take our jobs. Robots are going to take over altogether. Robots are even going to take over our sex lives. Yadda yadda yadda.

I’m not saying it won’t happen; I just think it’s farther away than the impression most people are getting from all the news. What’s here right now is genetic editing, and with it, the possibility of directing human evolution. The very real and very near possibility of changing what it means to be human. Read all the artificial intelligence and future of work articles–yes. But listen to what Elizabeth Parrish has to say about modifying the human genome to reverse aging and to keep up–cognitively and physically–with robots.

Seeking Delphi™ will be on vacation next week. Enjoy the peace and quiet.

Self-Driving vehicles–Have we been hearing altogether too much about autonomous vehicle development, lately. Satirical web site, The Onion, seems to think so. The released the image below with headline Tesla Debuts Carless Driver.

Image Credit: The Onion

Thanks for visiting and reading. See you in two weeks.

While you’re reading about all this week’s future-related news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes, PlayerFM, or YouTube(audio with slide show) and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook

“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”–Elon Musk

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”–Alan Kay

Technology was everywhere in 2017. And everywhere technology went, Elon Musk was sure to lead. Perhaps we should paraphrase Alan Kay. The best way to predict the future, is to watch Elon. If anybody is inventing it, it’s him. Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX, Neuralink, Hyperloop. If it involved renewable energy, autonomous vehicles, space commerce, transhumanism, or warnings about artificial intelligence (lot’s of warnings), it probably involved Elon.

With that, I name Elon Musk, in total, our first Future Story of The Year, for 2017. Here’s a very brief history of his year, along with some of the other top stories from 2017.

While you’re reading about it all, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes or PlayerFM, and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook

So…how many new technology ventures will he create in 2018, as he continues to invent the future? I’d put the over/under at 2 1/2.

Other top stories of the Year.

Artificial intelligence, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, self-driving cars, Bitcoin and blockchain, reversing aging and the future of work, were all frequently in the news in 2017. Somewhat less visible were stories about laboratory grown meat, reversing aging, hypersonic weapons, 3D printing and advanced drone technology. Here are few top story lists from other sources.

“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.” –George Carlin

Ah, the moon; so close, and yet so far away. Has it really been almost fifty years since Neil Armstrong took his one small step for man? Now, finally, the race is on to go back to our nearby celestial neighbor. But in 1969, the only motivation was to win a race that was instigated by the cold war. Now there is different driver in play. It’s money; many of the new players, in what is now a multi-way competition, are commercial ventures.

While you’re reading about all this week’s future-related news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes or PlayerFM, and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Max Tegmark is not one to shy away from bold scientific pronouncements. The MIT cosmologist and physics professor is perhaps best known for his taxonomy of a four level multiverse—some levels of which are predicted by certain theories, but none of which have been proven to exist. In his previous book, Our Mathematical Universe, My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, he offers the astounding conjecture that the whole of reality may be nothing more than pure mathematics.

So, what, if anything, makes Life 3.0, Being Human in The Age of Artificial Intelligence different? Unlike a universe of multiverses, or of pure mathematics, it deals with issues that are right in front of our faces. And his taxonomy of Life 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 is not a mere conjecture that can’t yet— or might never—be tested. Artificial
intelligence is happening right in front of us, and we have a multiplicity of issues to deal with, while we still can control it. Even as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are shouting loudly about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, and many actual AI researchers are countering that the dangers are overblown and distorted, Tegmark is doing something to bridge hype and reality. Or at least, he’s trying to. The problem is, there is no consensus even among the experts. He provides the reader with a wide range of scenarios. Many are not pretty—from a corporation using advanced AI to control global markets and ultimately governments, to a runaway AI that discards human intervention to rule the world itself. And yet, he asserts, all of the scenarios he presents have actual expert believers in their possibility.

The ultimate answer is, we don’t know. Tegmark is not so much warning against its development—it’s probably impossible to stop—as he is advising about its challenges, opportunities and dangers. He knows that the experts don’t really know, and neither does he. But he’s not afraid to present bold scenarios to awaken our awareness. He sums it up best in Chapter 5, Intelligence Explosion:

The short answer is obviously that we have no idea what will happen if humanity succeeds in building human-level AGI. For this reason, we’ve spent this chapter exploring a broad spectrum of scenarios. I’ve attempted to be quite inclusive, spanning the full range of speculations I’ve seen or heard discussed by AI researchers and technologists: fast takeoff/ slow takeoff/no takeoff, humans/ machines/cyborgs in control. I think it’s wise to be humble at this stage and acknowledge how little we know, because for each scenario discussed above, I know at least one well-respected AI researcher who views it as a real possibility.

Tegmark makes is clear, that for all the unknowns, we need to proceed with caution. Bold conjectures and scenarios sometimes turn into realities. And some of these potential realities are not where we want to go. Decisions we make about machine intelligence in the next few decades will go a long way to deciding the future of humanity—our evolution or even our continued existence. He goes on to present possible scenarios for what we might look like in 10,000 and even 1 Billion years. It’s fascinating, but mind-numbing. We simply might not be able to control any of it.

“We’re going to become caretakers for the robots. That’s what the next generation of work is going to be.”–Gray Scott

Hmmm. Will we be caretakers for them, or them for us? Will there even be a next generation of work? Hot on the heels of my Seeking Delphi™ podcast interview, with John C. Havens, on ethical considerations in artificial intelligence, comes a flurry of additional A.I.-related stories.

While you’re reading about all this week’s future-related news, don’t forget that you can subscribe to Seeking Delphi™ podcasts on iTunes or PlayerFM, and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook